Reflections on the Place of Larkin Author(s): Derek Spooner Reviewed work(s): Source: Area, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Jun.

, 2000), pp. 209-216 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20004059 . Accessed: 26/04/2012 06:36
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Area (2000) 32.2, 209-216

Reflections
Department

on the place
Derek Spooner

of Larkin

of Geography, University of Hull, Hull, HU6 7RX E-mail D.J.Spooner@geo.hull.ac.uk

Revised manuscript

received 5 July 1999.

Summary The close association of the poet Larkin with the city of Hull has induced references to Larkinland, though commercial exploitation of this concept is very limited. This paper examines Larkin's sense of place and explores his relationship with Hull and its environs. In drawing on his own personal landscapes, Larkin intermittently involves the reader in the pleasure of recognition. For the inhabitant of Hull, some poems have added value. 'Here' paints an evocative picture of Hull in the 1950s, but also links to the interpretation of Larkin as the poet of provincial England. However, Larkinland, either as Hull or as provincial mid-century England, has a slender basis.

Introduction: exploitingliterary heritage

In recent years there has been a growth of interest in literary heritage, the places writers came from, the landscapes and journeys immortalized in theirwork. According to Margaret Drabble (1979): 'every writer's work is a record both of himself (sic) and of the age inwhich he lives, as well as of the particular places he describes'. Seeing landscape through the eyes of a particular writer is a source of pleasure, and our perception of a particular landscape may be shaped by the writer's. The pleasure isoften linked to a nostalgia for the greener, unspoilt landscape of the past connected with the English countryside and some Golden Age of innocent childhood (Williams 1973; Squire 1993). The Atlas of Literature, edited by Malcolm Bradbury (1996), exemplifies the trend, describing itself as a 'companion to hundreds of literary landscapes, sites and shrines'. Inevitably, local or regional literary heritage is increasingly marketed as a tourist attraction and as a vehicle for local economic development. This ranges from the offering of literary tours (there is for example a Tolkien Trail in Kings Heath and Ladywood in Birmingham to see the locations that may have inspired a young JRR to write of Gondor, Mordor and the Lord of the Rings) to the conversion of writers' homes to museums and shrines (think of the Bronte parsonage at Haworth, or of Beatrix Potter's Hill Top Farm in the Lake District), to the
ISSN 0004-0894 (? Royal Geographical Society (with The

promotion of particular localities under such labels as Catherine Cookson Country or Bronte Country (Pocock 1987, 1992) by local tourist offices and development departments. Sometimes such adop tions can be quite subtle-the use of Tennyson's poetry to promote the now defunct borough of Glanford showed particular imagination, with lines from the Lady of Shallot (sic) set against a picture of a Lincolnshire wold (though it is not at all clear that Tennyson was thinking of North Lincolnshire when he wrote the Lady of Shalott; and it is a pity that they didn't check the spelling). The trend to commercial exploitation has also extended beyond canonical literature to television and film drama (sometimes based on popular novels), broadening the concept of an imagined landscape. North Yorkshire for example is now 'Herriot country', with Hambleton Council bidding for money from the Millennium Commission, which awards National Lottery funds to projects to mark the Millennium, to establish 'the World of James Herriot' in Thirsk. The promotion and exploitation of literary heritage is most commonly associated with novels and novelists, but poets are not immune. Grasmere is overrun with visitors to Wordsworth's Dove Cottage. In Northern Ireland, South County Derry is now marketed as Heaney country and has its Heaney Trail. Across the border in the Republic, Sligo is emphatically Yeats country, with boat trips to view the Lake Isle of Innisfree, and signposted tours to
Institute of British Geographers) 2000

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Spooner provincial places), but it is with Hull that he has become identified. Indeed his luminous presence may have had something to do with the significant development of the cluster of Hull poets, including the likes of Douglas Dunn, Sean O'Brien and Andrew Motion (who became Poet Laureate in 1999).4 Dunn and Motion were both colleagues of Larkin at Hull University. In this paper Iexplore the extent towhich Hull can be identified as Larkinland, focusing upon the sense of place conveyed in his poetry. To what extent was Larkin responding to Hull as a locale? How does Larkin talk to the reader about place? Iargue that a handful of Larkin's poems speak to the reader very directly about Hull and its immediate environs, enhancing our awareness of this city. However, the predominant sense of place conveyed is not specific to any locality. Itmay contribute to our picture of the larger place 'provincial England' in a particular phase in its post-war development. Seamus Heaney (1982, p.135) has said that Larkin's poems should be re-titled 'Englanders', while Davie (1973, p.64) concluded that 'there has been the widest agree ment ... that Philip Larkin is for good or ill the effective unofficial laureate of post-1945 England'. More recently Bradbury (1996) has discussed Larkin's contribution to scenes from provincial life, and argued that Larkin became famous as 'the poet of provincial Englishness'. This claim however may not bear too close a scrutiny. As Kong and Tay (1998) have recently noted, geographers have adopted a number of different approaches to the relationship between geography and literature-humanistic, regional, and structural. The humanistic approach, as exemplified by the work of Relph (1976) and Seamon (1981), is particu larly relevant to the poetic portrayal of place, with its emphasis on the exploration of atmosphere, mean ing and symbols and on our personal response to place. The regional approach has been developed by those geographers who have turned to the regional novel to discover the character, personality and identity of regions (Kong and Tay 1998); poetry can also provide opportunities of this nature. The structural approach sees the author as the product of a particular society, reflecting and revealing its ideology and values, and emphasizes the importance of situating any analysis 'within an understanding of particular historical and geographical contexts' (Kong and Tay 1998). This paper is informed by, and attempts to blend, all three approaches. The first part of the analysis

places associated with the Yeats canon (Ben Bulben, Dooney, Lissadell ...). The identification of Shrop shire as 'Housman's country' is obvious (even though AE Housman came from Worcestershire and wrote The Shropshire Lad in London), while Shakespeare-poet and playwright-has spawned a huge heritage industry at Stratford upon Avon.

Looking for Larkinland

Philip Larkin (1922-85) remains one of England's most eminent and best-loved poets, though his personal reputation was seriously tarnished by rev elations in his biography (Motion 1993) and edited letters (Thwaite 1992) of his intemperate views on race and other matters and his fondness for pornography. Like several other great writers (Hardy, Dickens), his literary reputation seems likely to survive our knowledge of his personal flaws. Larkin lived and worked in Kingston upon Hull (hereafter Hull) as University Librarian for the last 30 years of his life and it iswith thismedium-sized, freestanding, port city on England's eastern seaboard that he is most commonly associated (even as 'the hermit of Hull' (Bennett 1994)). However, although the word 'Larkinland'"has appeared in the press, it is difficult to discern any significant exploitation of this concept inHull, though the publication of a Larkin trail in Jean Hartley's Philip Larkin's Hull and East Yorkshire (1995) was a gentle nudge in that direction. Yet there is rarely a media reference to the image of Hull-a problem that has seriously vexed the city authorities in recent years, leading to the launch of an image enhancement campaign-without some allusion to Larkin or his poetry, with the poet's level voice and reclusive nature portrayed as matching the flatness and isolation of the city. Thus the Rough Guide entry for Hull begins with a reference to Larkin as the 'city's most famous adopted son' and a quotation from Larkin about the flatness of Hull, 'a town which reaches few heights, physical or otherwise' and which is suited to the 'poet's cur mudgeonly temperament' (Rough Guide, 1998).2 Larkinwas, of course, initiallyan outsider to Hull, and was born inCoventry ('not the place's fault') poeti cally recalled in IRemember, IRemember (1954),3 the opening verse of which has recently been inscribed on a plaque on Coventry railway station, in a modest first step by that locality to promote him as a Coventrian (followed by the launch of a LarkinCity Centre Trail). He also studied inOxford and worked in Shropshire, Leicester and Belfast (interestingly all

Reflections on the place of Larkin 21 1 draws upon humanistic ideas to explore Larkin's become mythical (and probably exaggerated).5 In an interview with Paris Review in 1982 he stated that he personal response to place, and in particular to 'to describe recognizable experiences as Hull. Later sections of the paper return to the wrote regional approach which characterized an earlier memorably as possible' (Larkin1983, 75). This devel write paper on this topic (Spooner 1992), while the final ops an idea he expressed many years earlier: 'I discussion of Larkin as poet of provincial England is to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt'.6 But things seen or experienced may bear some relation situated within a broader historical and geographical to particular places, whose description becomes part context. of the product. Most of his poems are in his words, about Larkin's personal landscapes 'enhancing the everyday' (Brett 1988)-the ordinary For all of us, personal landscapes are important; the episodes of life and death, the difficulties of personal local, familiar and ordinary places that make up our relationships, growing old. 'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere' is an oft-quoted Larkin line everyday landscape. These provide us with a sense of rootedness and meaning, and some sort of (from I Remember, I Remember). In a letter to Patsy Murphy in 1958, he wrote: 'the first thing Iask allegiance to a home territory or common ground, of any environment is that it should be ignorable' although depending on who we are and where we come from, they also may give a sense of alienation. (Thwaite 1992). Such sentiments appear to support Relph (1976), investigating the nature of place as an the argument of Porteous(1 997) that a sense of experience, concluded that its essential experiential place is marginal to Larkin's oeuvre and that his is a sense of no-place, of core is 'insideness'-the chief achievement degree to which a person belongs to and associates himself with place. Relph anywhereness. It is true that the personal landscape of Larkin's terms the most profound sense of place existential insideness, where 'a place is experienced without poetry isone that only intermittently betrays its place deliberate and self-conscious reflection, yet is full specificity. The city of Hull in fact never appears by is existential with significances'; the opposite name, nor does the riverHumber (Larkin leaves this outsideness, where the individual feels separate from to Douglas Dunn (see below) and to Stevie Smith 'No wonder/the in a silken place and alienated from a meaningless environ river Humber/lies ment. Newcomers to a place are existential outsiders slumber').7 There are clear references to the locality in only a small number of the 80 or so poems Larkin who may become insiders as they develop a constel wrote after moving to Hull in 1955, especially Here lation of experiential ties, but they can never become (1961), The Whitsun Weddings (1958) and Bridge complete insiders because their past permeates and for the Living (1975), the last a commissioned colours the present place (Seamon 1981). However, an individual becomes rooted in a place as he/she cantata celebrating the building of the Humber Road Bridge (and arguably one of his less successful develops relationships with it-and this 'rootedness' relates not only to a geographical landscape but also poems). Bridge for the Living is the only one of these to a social landscape (in a community), an emotional three poems where locations are clearly fixed: 'Tall landscape (intimacy with individuals) and an intellec church towers parley airily audible,/Howden and tual landscape (acquired knowledge and ideas) Beverley, Hedon and Patrington', though the refer ence to 'Where sky and Lincolnshire and water (Middleton 1981). meet' in The Whitsun Weddings identifies the begin Poetry (and other writing) explores the meanings that places have and through the gift of imagination ning of the poem's journey unmistakably by the river and the writer's filtered perception add to the enjoy Humber, while the title of another poem, Friday ment and awareness of our surroundings. Itcan thus Night at the Royal Station Hotel (1966) also fixes it in serve as a means to penetrate the complexities that space and time; the hotel of this name burned down in 1990 and has re-opened as the Quality Royal underlie people's relationships with their environ ment. Literature provides a source of new insights Hotel. Indeed one might argue that Larkin appears to and assists us to explore the experiential foundation be deliberately reticent about place names and of our world (Pocock 1981). shows a preference for withholding specific place references, perhaps consciously seeking to universal Philip Larkin saw himself as engaged in his poetry in recreating the familiar, and indeed his dislike for ize the poems. Yet some remain identifiably rooted in local experiences. travel and lack of curiosity about other places has

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Spooner Larkin (1971) himself expressed some views on the significance of 'topographical and period back ground to a work of literature' in an essay on Betjeman. Betjeman's poetry, of course, is much more explicit than Larkin's in its identification of places. The poems are littered with place names. But as Larkin points out: 'I know Brent,Wembley, Northolt and so on are in me so, but I'venever Middlesex, because Betjeman tells been there andwhat Ifeel about them depends entirely on what he tellsme about them.... The crucialpoint is whether the readergets enough out of thework initially to make itworth his while solving the references to deepen the enjoyment'. My argument here is that solving the references to topography is aided by experience of the place described, enhancing the enjoyment, even while the poetry retains its universal appeal.

The personal landscapes of Larkin's poetry can therefore be viewed in two ways. The problem is the reader, who may or may not have seen the land scapes on which Larkin has drawn. The reading of the poems may or may not therefore involve the reader in the pleasure of recognition (Watson, 1989). Literary text-the poems-lies somewhere between the writer, the individual reader and the landscape or place itself.Given the relative obscurity of Hull (a recent study by Spooner et al (1995) found that the city suffered from being little known and the lack of a clear external image), it is clear that most readers will not have the benefit of familiarity or recognition, but these readers can still enjoy a beautifully crafted description as well as more complex interpretations. Those of us who live in Hull (insiders) are thus in a sense privileged because of the bonus of recog nition. Larkin's imagination and skill with words heighten our awareness of our specific surround ings. Thus The Building (1972) is both a poem about a hospital which can be enjoyed by anyone, and a brilliant evocation of 'the lucent comb' of Hull Royal Infirmary: every time Ipass the infirmary the lines of The Building are conjured inmy mind and indeed the lines of How (1970), where he as 'Lighted cliffs, against describes hospitals dawns/of days people will die on'. This poem then adds, 'I can see one from here'-Hull Royal Infir mary was visible from the poet's attic flat in 32 Pearson Park, Hull. To the initiated the picture of Hull and the Humber presented in a poem likeHere is unmistakable, and there are elements in the poem distinct to the city for example 'the slave museum', 'barge-crowded water'. Wilberforce House in Hull is the slave museum, named after William Wilberforce, one of the city's most famous sons; it stands alongside the working river still used by barges, the river Hull, close to its confluence with the Humber, and now the focus of urban regeneration efforts. The poem thus has added value; our enjoyment of our home territory is enhanced. But the poem is also a picture of any large town (at least in provincial, estuarine England) in a particular period (the 1950s) which can be enjoyed by anyone. Thus Porteous (1997) has argued that 'here' to Larkin is also anywhere (and everywhere). We might compare Drabble's remark (1979) about once Housman's 'blue-remembered hills'-'at unmistakably Shropshire and unmistakably every where: an inner landscape of universal loss'. I enjoyed The Shropshire Lad before Isaw Shropshire.

Larkin and Hull

Why did Ibring you to thisHull, This rancid and unbeautiful surprise of damp and Englishness? (DouglasDunn, Envoi, 1986) It is perhaps debatable whether Larkin liked Hull. His poems about itmight be described as detached. In Here and The Whitsun Weddings the device of the train journey increases the sense of detachment; Larkin is a spectator, separated from the landscape by glass. Larkin claimed that poetry was about 'see ing things as they are', and when he describes places the style is sometimes almost documentary; he expresses a sense of realism rather than emotional attachment. And as a relative newcomer to the city, an element of 'outsideness' (if not alienation) is retained. Indeed a year before he moved to Hull Larkin professed a lack of identity with any particular place in the poem Places, Loved Ones (1954):
No Ihave never found

The place where Icould say This ismy proper ground Here Ishall stay Ironically he was to spend most of the rest of his life Here, in Hull. In his early days in Hull his letters (Thwaite 1992) tended to be derogatory about the city:

Reflections on the place of Larkin 213 Riding'. It appears that familiarity had bred both affection and contempt. Larkin's last prose comments on Hull are con tained in the preface he wrote to A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull (Dunn 1982). The city is 'as 'Hullsmelt revoltingof fish thismorning: my secretary good a place to write in as any. Better in fact than itwas going to rain. And it did.' (1955, said that meant some'. The statement is brief but sympathetic in to Richard and PatsyMurphy): tone-Hull is unpretentious, has an end-of-the line sense of freedom, has its own sudden elegancies; it is 'Ihave come to the conclusion that the peculiar horror 'a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge about Hull is that the smuts-and there are plenty of it to have a different resonance'. Perhaps the of ....... I've not come them, drifting around, are fishy across this feature anywhere else and Idon't like it.' transition from outsider to insider had come close to completion. (1 956, to JudyEgerton): Loved or not, 'here' or 'not here', an evocative picture of Hull and the Humber estuary is painted by 'Hull is like a backdrop for a ballet about industrialism Larkin in Here and The Whitsun Weddings. These crushing the naturalgoodness of men, a good swinge ing, left-wingballet.' (1957, to Robert Conquest): poems however are period pieces-they evoke the Hull of 30 years ago or more (Spooner 1992). 'Smelt 'headline in the Daily Telegraph recently 'Hull insured the fishdock'; the smell of the fish dock no longer for ?30,000'-just about the rightprice, I thought, but pervades, as Hull's fishing fleet has declined and the theywere talkingabout a ship' (1958, to Patsy Murphy): fishmeal factory has been demolished. Both poems describe a train journey, one arriving in and the other and more neutrally, departing from Hull, and both convey eloquently to the reader that sense of remoteness that character 'Hull'sa difficultplace to drop inon' (1965, to Pamela ized Hull before modern motorway connections Kitson). were constructed and it began to re-image itself as the 'northern gateway to Europe'. Here is descriptive of Kingston upon Hull in the This last feature seems to have become in time a 1950s and the 1 reason for liking the place, a protection from intrud 960s-'a terminate and fishy ers (Booth 1992). Perhaps the former newcomer to smelling/Pastoral of ships up streets', populated by Hull was making the transition from existential out 'residents from raw estates'. Hull was still in the throes of reconstruction after horrendous war sider to insider (Relph 1976) and was becoming 'rooted'. Certainly by the 1970s he was embedded damage. ItsOld Town and inner city docks were in in the University community, and had mapped out decay; its economy stagnant. Motion (1993) sug through friendships and liaisons a local emotional gests that Larkin had arrived in a large city 'at the end landscape. But he also seems to have become of one kind of life,waiting for another to begin'. In attuned to the geographical landscape. In 1979 he fact when Larkin wrote Here (1961), the sharp said in an interview with The Observer (Larkin1983, decline of the fishing industry and of much of the 54) that he liked Hull 'because it's so far away from city's industry was still to come. If Larkin returned everywhere else. On the way to nowhere, as some today he would certainly find it hard to recognize body put it. It's in the middle of this lonely country Hull's revamped 'docklands', which have been and beyond the lonely country there's only the sea. I transformed since the mid-1980s. As I have suggested in an earlier more detailed like that'. 'And Hull is an unpretentious place. There's not so much crap around as there would be in analysis of the portrait of Hull presented in Here London'. On the other hand Poem about Oxford, (Spooner, 1992), this poem speaks to at least four written for long-time lover Monica Jones in about recognizable themes in the local geography, and 1970, carries a hidden implication that Hull (and some of these are echoed in TheWhitsun Weddings, Leicester) have even less 'tone' than the city he Bridge for the Living, and snatches of other poems: studied in-'for while the old place hadn't much tone/Two others we know have got less'. A letter to (i) Isolation (the place 'where only salesmen and Robert Conquest in 1968 contains a gripe about 'a relations come' (Here), 'isolate city', 'lonely northern daughter' (Bridge for the Living)); bloody rainy chilly afternoon in this arsehole of East 'I wish Icould thinkof just one nice thing to tell you about Hull-oh yes, well, it's very nice and flat for 955, toAnsell cycling: that'sabout the best Ican say' (1 and JudyEgerton):

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Spooner are being ruined by development. However this is the only place where England as a geographical or political abstraction features in his poems, and Booth (1992) rightly points out thatwe should be cautious to attribute to Larkin (as did Draper (1989)) a 'deeply patriotic ... feeling for his native country' simply on the basis of Going, Going or his musings on the Great War in MCMXIV (1960). Larkin's England is really not identified clearly as an ideological territory. The sort of provincial England that Larkin seems to be regretting inGoing, Going, is a nostalgic ruralone 'the shadows, the meadows, the lanes, the guildhalls, the carved choirs...', reminiscent of the sleek southern landscape described by George Orwell on his return from Catalonia in 1938 ... 'railway cut tings smothered inwild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens'. As Raymond Williams has demon strated, nostalgia for pastoral golden ages is as old as civilization itself (Williams, 1973); Orwell and Larkin may simply be two recent examples in a long line of English prose and poetry writers who have expressed a concept of the country that is essentially a senti mental idea stemming from childhood, what Williams describes as the endlessly recessive 'happy Englands of my boyhood'. In the same way, the popularity of the children's books by Beatrix Potter (and of visits to Hill Top Farm) is argued by Squire(1993) to be linked strongly to nostalgia for an English countryside separate from the city-'Old England, the rural and picturesque'. Heaney's categorization of Larkin (with Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill) as one of the 'hoarders and shorers' of what is taken to be the 'real England' is expressing a similar argument; the craving to preserve communal ways and rituals (show Saturdays, church-going and marriages atWhitsun) and to confirm a threatened identity (Heaney, 1980). He sees Larkin's 'England of the mind' as continuous in many ways with the England of Rupert Brooke's Grantchester and Edward Thomas's Adlestrop-'an England of customs and institutions, industrial and domestic, but also an England whose pastoral hinterland is threatened by the very success of those institutions' (Heaney, 1980, 168). There is perhaps here more than nostal gia, an intensified valuing of native English experi ence, as England's external power and influence diminished. Orwell also wrote at length and in detail of the industrial north and its horrors, but Larkin makes

(ii) the spacious estuary ('the widening river's slow presence' (Here), 'the river's level drifting breadth' (TheWhitsun Weddings)). The estuary, 'where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet', obviously impressed Larkin, and the emptiness and spaciousness of the landscape ('a big sky drains down the estuary', Livings (1971)) is something that has struck other writers. There are clear affinities with Winifred Holtby's description in South Riding (1936) of 'the wide Dutch landscape, haunted by larks and seabirds, roofed by immense pavilions of windy cloud: the miles of brownish-purple shining mud ... the great ships gliding up to Kingsport ... the brave infrequent flowers, the reluctant springs, the loneliness, the silence ...' (iii) the urban-rural contrasts ('gathers to the surprise of a large town' (Here), 'and out beyond its half-built edges/Fast shadowed mortgaged wheatfields, running high as hedges' (Here)); (iv) the working class culture, the social geography of the city ('grim head-scarved wives', 'a cut-price crowd, urban yet simple' (Here)). Arguably this last theme is less place specific, though 'residents from, raw estates brought down/The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys' is a neat reminder of a form of public transport, the trolley bus, which ceased to run in Hull in 1964, and of the construction of huge blocks of council housing on the edge of this, the flattest of all major English cities, in the 1950s and 1960s.

Poet of provincial England?

In Here and other poems we link to the wider interpretation of Larkin as a poet of provincial life. It has been argued that inmany respects the provincial England that is portrayed conveys an atmosphere of desolation. Terry Eagleton considered that Larkin betrays a disaffection that belongs to his (provincial) place and time and an England in accelerating decline.9 As a declared anti-modernist, Larkin's dis illusion with change is perhaps unsurprising. This sentiment ismost clearly expressed inGoing, Going (1972), significantly commissioned by the Depart ment of the Environment,10 where Larkin laments the concreting of our green and pleasant land-'the bleak high rises' (very visible in North Hull from his University eyrie) ... 'the whole boiling will be bricked in'. He concludes gloomily 'that will be England gone'. This is at variance with his views that nothing much happens in the provinces-rather they

Reflections on the place of Larkin 21 5 describe Larkin as a poet of place. Similarly while relatively little acknowledgement of this other provin cial England. We are afforded only glimpses of this glimpses of provincial English life are provided in some of his poems (good examples are To the Sea legendary north inHere, The Large Cool Store (1961) (1969), with its evocation of the traditional English ('the weekday world of those/Who leave at dawn seaside holiday, Livings and Show Saturday (1973), low terraced houses/Timed for factory, yard and site') and The Explosion, a poignant episode in the with their portrayal of the rural shires) they do not life of a mining village ('on the day of the explosion/ provide a coherent picture of provincial England or its landscapes. shadows pointed towards the pithead:/in the sun the There appears therefore to be limited scope for slagheap slept').What we do have-until the wistful a neutral and observant ness of Going, Going-is the exploitation of the Larkin heritage in the city of description of an inhabited, even congested, urban Kingston upon Hull, and the use of Larkin's poetry in rural England, where farms, hedges and cattle are city promotion is likely to be constrained by his mixed with roofs and gardens, chemical froth and ambivalent attitude towards the city (reflecting his abandoned cars (Davie, 1973), as exemplified by experience as a newcomer not able or perhaps these lines from The Whitsun Weddings: wishing to become the complete insider), the lack of glamour in his portrayal of it, and the sparseness of specific identifiable references in the poetry. Yet the Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and Canals with floatings of industrialfroth; city of Hull might certainly make more of its Larkin A hothouse flashed uniquely;hedges dipped connections as the place that the poet lived and And rose; and now and then a smell of grass worked in (the shrine concept). There is at present Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth little acknowledgement of Larkin's presence, save on Until the next town, new and nondescript Hull University's campus, and even there it ismuted. Approached with acres of dismantled cars. We await 'theWorld of Philip Larkin'. This is the more typical Larkin voice; itwould be Acknowledgements unwise perhaps to overstress the different, but for An earlierversion of thispaper was presented at the New Larkinmore unusual, tone of Going, Going. Although LarkinsforOld Conference at Hull University in 1997. Iam Larkin strongly admired the poetry of Betjeman, which positively brims with nostalgia, most of his grateful to participants at the conference, and to David Sibley and Catherine Spooner, for theircomments on that own poetry studiously avoids measuring the present version. against the past. There is a temptation to see post-war England as poetically divided between Betjeman's Metroland in Notes the suburbanizing south-east, and Larkinland in the 1 Independent on Sunday 15 November 1995 ('Becalmed inLarkinland' by Stephen McClarence). peripheral regions, but this temptation should be 2 Other recent examples include a description of Hull in resisted. Betjeman in any case wrote profusely about TheGuardian as 'feted glumly by Philip Larkinand left many English places beyond Metroland (notably behind by the famous' (16 October 1997), while Cornwall and other parts of the South West), according to The Independent 'the city'smost famous and Betjeman and Larkin are quite different in residentwas the master of gloom, Philip Larkin' (10 their treatment of place and Englishness (Booth, November 1998). 1992). The basis for seeing outer-provincial England 3 References to individualpoems in this paper indicate as Larkinland is tenuous. Larkin's poems are the completion date recorded in Larkin'sCollected predominantly personal rather than provincial. Poems. 4 See, for example, the anthology,A Rumoured City: New
Poets from Hull, edited by Dunn and with a preface by

Conclusion
Itwould appear that the concept of Larkinland either as Kingston upon Hull and its hinterland, or as a dubious one. provincial mid-century England-is Despite the specificities of Here and a few other poems which provide added value for those who know Hull and East Yorkshire, it is an exaggeration to

Larkin. 5 Larkin'saverred antipathy to travel is often associated

with his remark that he wouldn't come actually back often the same travelled mind going to China Bennett if he could of Hull' day, but Alan in England

has wittily pointed out that the self-proclaimed 'hermit

at least, with

frequent journeys to London, Oxford, and Monica Jones'Northumberland cottage, and to collect a sackful

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Spooner HoltbyW (1936) South Riding (Viragoedition: 1988)

Kong L and Tay L (1998) 'Exalting the past: nostalgia and

of honours and seven honorary degrees-'he's about as big a recluse as the late Bubbles Rothermere' (Bennett 1994, 368). 6 From 'Statement',1955, collected inRequiredWriting. 7 The line is from the poem The RiverHumber. Stevie Smithwas born inHull, but moved to PalmersGreen, Londonwhen she was 3 years old (MacGibbon, 1978). 8 Winifred Holtby was brought up in the East Riding of Yorkshire and her last novel, South Riding, draws strongly on her experience of local landscapes. Kingsport, for example, is a thinly disguised Kingston upon Hull. 9 This view was expressed in a Channel 4 television programme, in1992, 'Philip Larkin, j'accuse'-Larkin as the poet of 'a society in accelerating industrial decline, bereft of its imperialglory,with no big brave causes left'. 10 This poem isdated in its reference to 'greyarea grants', a feature of British regional policy in the 1 970s, was encouraged to relocate to 'grey' whereby industry or Intermediate Areas, which were struggling to com pete with themore seriously depressed 'black'Devel opment Areas where generous financial incentives
were already available. Hull was and still is an Inter

mediate Area but the term 'greyarea' has faded from use. References Bennett A (1994)Writing home (Faberand Faber,London) Writer (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Booth J (1 992) PhilipLarkin, Hemel Hempstead) Bradbury M (ed.) (1996) The atlasof literature(DeAgostini, London)
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